Menudo is a spicy Mexican soup made with tripe, onions, tomatoes, chilies and hominy. Additional common ingredients include lime, chopped cilantro, crushed oregano and red chili peppers for a spicier taste.
Menudo is so popular in Mexico that the United States and Canadian beef producers export a substantial amount of tripe to Mexico. According to Wikipedia, in the last season of the television series Sanford & Son, Fred Sanford made a reference to the meal menudo in virtually every episode as an ongoing joke. Menudo is referred to as the “breakfast of champions” in New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. Furthermore, there are several menudo festivals in cities across the country.
The making of menudo is a very time intensive endeavor taking up to seven hours to make. A typical recipe includes first cleaning the meat, such as tripe which consists of beef stomach tissue. The meat is then hand-cut into strips and then into squares. This procedure is very time consuming and difficult because of the texture and toughness of the meat. Furthermore, it is very difficult to cut the meat consistently to create uniform square shapes. This can result in menudo having an inconsistency which is undesirable to the eater of the menudo dish. The recipe for menudo typically continues with the feet and tendons boiled first at low to medium heat for about three hours. Preferably, the foam is removed about every fifteen minutes for the first hour to assist in the flavor. After three hours, the stomach meat which has been cut into squares is introduced into the broth along with salt, onion, garlic and chili paste. After an additional few hours of continuous boiling, hominy is added.
Unfortunately, due to the difficulty in uniformly and quickly cutting the tripe, menudo is relatively expensive in restaurants and rarely cooked in homes. It would therefore be desirable to provide a device for cutting tripe into squares of a size suitable for menudo. Furthermore, it would be preferable that the device provided uniformity of the tripe squares to provide a consistency for the soup.
Many devices have been created for cutting food such as meats and bread. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,823,079 illustrates an apparatus including a central base and slotted sidewalls. The sidewalls slots are sized for receipt of a knife so that meats placed within the central space can be cut uniformly. U.S. Pat. No. 5,907,989 illustrates a rack having a central base and slotted sidewalls. In addition, the device includes a snap-in fastener for holding an electric cutting blade. U.S. Pat. No. 5,499,578 illustrates a sausage cutting device. The device includes a cylindrical cavity in which sausage is inserted. Vertical slots allow a knife blade to slice downwardly through the sausage to cut uniform slices of sausage. U.S. Pat. No. 4,056,026 illustrates a device for cutting meat for placement on skewers. The device is relatively complicated in which meat is placed in a central cavity. The device includes slots on both the left and right sides as well as the front and back sides so that meat can be cut into pieces for placement upon skewers.
Unfortunately, each of these previously developed devices have been developed for cutting meat or bread into slices, but not squares. Unfortunately, a device and method of use is needed for cutting tripe into uniform squares.